Christian: Every now and then you get to these moments where
you are not like stalking someone but where you are just accepted in their
living room. You're accepted in their lives for a brief moment and that's
really beautiful.

Thank you all for being here tonight... for our tropical
adventure. So, this is my natural habitat. This is a beech forest in Germany. It's
where I grew up. And it's utterly undiverse. But it was beautiful. It was
enough to kind of get me interested in nature.

So, as an undergrad I had a chance to go first to Africa for
a little bit. It was nice, it was more savannah than forest. And then I ended
up in Asia. But in these explorations I also realized for every place I went that
was beautiful and full of these amazing life forms, I was flying over, driving through
a lot of this: really messed-up landscapes. In Asia at the time, and still today,
this is preparing what was a rainforest a year ago for oil palm. An easy to do
thing at home is not buy anything that has palm oil. Including unfortunately
Nutella, which was a hard blow for me.

But, yeah, I saw this I thought I really want to do something
about that, so... I realized, well, I'd seen a fair bit of Asia, I'd seen a
little bit of Africa, but I had never been in the new world. I'd never been in
South or Central America. So, I flew to Panama City and to Barro Colorado
Island which is a beautiful island in Lake Gatun in Central Panama. And is the
principal field site of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. I got very
interested in bats. Because there's 74 species of bats on these tiny, little
1600 hectares of Barro Colorado. And there had been lot of science done on how
they actually, how do they fit all on this island. And one of the axis how bats
avoid competition is what they feed on. And here's a fishing bat catching fish.
So, this is a multiple exposure of the same bat and this is what the moment looks
like. Bang! Others eat fruit yet others are nectar feeders. Of course there's
others that eat insects, you get the idea. So they just can't do the same
thing.

And the whole night business led me to spend a rather long
time at night around this flower. This is the flower of a tree called the Balsa
tree. And this very fast growing perineum attracts its pollinators by offering
insane amounts of nectar, about two ounces. So, what happens if nobody messes
with it... this is in the late afternoon, this flower opens. It takes about two
hours. But often times naughty monkeys mess with it. Because there's already
some nectar in the afternoon. So, rather than waiting for it to open they pry
it open, drink the nectar, often in the process destroy the flower. So that's
not a good thing for the tree, but they can't do much about it. And others take
advantage of that. So once the flower is open still in the day time in the
afternoon there's two wasps having a conversation about who should actually drink
that nectar. There's birds, this is yellow-rumped cacique taking off from one of
these flowers. It's a big flower, it's about the size of a big beer glass.

So, this is a tiny hummingbird, he can't really come from
top because he would get trapped in there so he pokes its beak between two
petals and sucks it from the side. Of course that attracts predators like,
there'a a boa... hoping for me, probably more for a bat because there's bats
that come later at night. There's bees coming, so everybody comes because it's
a huge amount of pollen and it's a massive amount of nectar. And each flower is
only open for one night. Then right at nightfall, the night shift starts coming
in. And this here is a woolly opossum. It's a tiny guy, like a half-pound, and
they come very early. They come right-- the moment it becomes dark enough so
they are not seen by raptors, they start coming out. And the reason why they
are so energetic about being free early is that about 45 minutes later, the
next bigger guys come in and they kick them out. So they have about 45 minutes to
drink as much as they can. And they do. Here you get an idea of just how much nectar
is in there. It's like a lake. And they are very enthusiastic about it.

This is the next meanie guy. So, this is a common opossum, and
they are not so friendly. And they're about four times the size, so they now
come and they kick the little guys out. Bats come, often not very gracefully they
kind of pancake on top of the flower and drink some and then they fly off
again. And then there's the Kinkajou. And that appears to be the main
pollinator in that area. Some very shy things came too. This is a night monkey,
an owl monkey and the reason why that is black and white is because they were
really, really nervous.

So, this is taken, like many of photos I was not there. They
were taken with a remote camera that I set up and then push the button from... quite
a distance. I was with binoculars. So, this one you needed to take the whole visible
light aspect out of it and we used modified camera that could see in the
infrared. And we used light like flashes where we blocked all the visible light
so all you saw coming out was like from your remote on a TV. So, this is a
photo taken entirely without visible light.

And with this, I think, we leave for Central Africa. So,
that is probably the least explored of the big forests of the world, Congo
Basin. Mainly really because it's pretty hard to work there. Because the
political situation is somewhere between bad and catastrophic. I went there to
photograph our closest relative, the bonobo. And it's kind of absurd how little
we know about it considering how close we are to it, so we are closer to these
guys than to chimpanzees, than to gorillas. And we don't know anything what they
actually do in the wild. And working with primates is really hard. The apes,
you need to invest many, many years to really, even start to think about taking
data.

So, when we started this, we spent some time in a bonobo
orphanage, kind of like a refugee camp where a lot of young bonobos especially
when they get confiscated because they try to sell them for pets, while they
shot the parents and sold them as bushmeat. So each of these baby bonobos gets
a human mom that hangs out with them everyday for 12 hours. And until they are
six or seven, and then you can start to integrate them into groups. This is
David Quammen, the author of this story being under very serious examination, I
think. I think this guy knows more about me than my dermatologist.

They have hilarious kids, they are like very interested, they
are very playful. And of course what bonobos are known for is the whole sex
thing that they are these super sex monkeys... apes. It turns out that is
mainly like a zoo artifact. Because the whole sex thing has, it has a social
function. It is to release tension and to avoid conflict over really special
food items. The type of food items that they don't really find in the wild. But
that happens there three times a day. So, there was plenty of that three times
a day it was really going crazy there. And then I spent 40 days with them in
the wild, I saw sex twice. So, it happens, it is a behavior they have, but it's
hugely inflated in frequency by the fact that they get beautiful bananas and papayas
three times a day.

So, then we needed to actually go and try to see the real
thing. So, this is four hours flight outside Kinshasa to Salonga National Park.
And it's fascinating. It's a really, really big forest. And somewhere in there is
this little clearing which is Lui Kotale Research Station. It's a station run
by the German Max Planck Society. So, there's this little paradise bubble of
Congo lowland forest that actually has all the animals that I suppose-- Because
you fly over this and you think there must be full of stuff, right? And it's
not. Most of this is empty. Because there's thousands and thousands and
thousands of kilos of bushmeat that go down the river every day. It's not
people that need protein. It is a market that's driven by really fancy
restaurants where you spend like hundreds of dollars for bushmeat in Kinshasa,
in Brazzaville, in Paris, in London, in New York.

So, Max Planck established this little island in there that
they were kind enough to allow me in. And the first three years that they tried
to habituate these bonobos... they didn't see them ever. They just went, they
went in the area they saw nests, they sleep in nests and they tried to get a
feel of how they were moving around. And then they started seeing them every
now and then. They could hear them, so, the next morning they tried to be where
they would wake up and just like show themselves. So, the bonobos would see
there's humans and they don't shoot at them. After about five years they started
the first observation. So, I came in year nine by which time they were totally
fine at about like... you know, 50-60 feet distance. Scientists would go there every
day, would observe them and it's a very big group of about 40 animals. But they
break up in smaller sub-groups and they spread out over big areas.

You also see they have all black teeth. Because they eat a
lot of fruit that has hugely high tannin content. So, already the young bonobos
have very black teeth from all the tannin, whereas if you remember the ones
earlier from the orphanage they have very nice white teeth because all they eat
is bananas and papayas. Females lead the society. Groups of females and bonobo
child will inherit the social rank from its mom. So, it's very important who
your mom was in this kind of power architecture of the bonobo group. But
they're generally very nice to each other. Just if males get a little too
funky, like... the group of dominant females will beat them up and put them in their
place, so...

This is young Ulrich. Because it's a German camp many of
them have like, funny German names. This is Ulrich, he's about three-years-old.
There's always the moment where you step on a branch and there's this big noise
and suddenly everyone looks at you. It's like, “What's he doing here?” And so,
this one time I started just grabbing a leaf they were eating leaves, I grabbed
just a random leaf and started eating it, they seemed to “alright, he's eating,
okay.” So, from then on I just made it a policy. I was eating whatever they
were eating. And they eat good stuff. It's all really good and I cut down on my
snacks in the field, it was good.

This was one of the last days by which time this particular
sub-group, we had spent a lot of time and I was, you know, I was within 12 feet
or so of this and they were just kind of okay with me there. And that is
probably one of the most rewarding parts of my work. That every now and then you
get to these moments where you are not like stalking someone but where you are
just accepted in their living room you're accepted in their lives for a brief
moment and... and that's really, that's beautiful. Thank you very much for your
attention.